Under Milk Wood Read online

  MR PRITCHARD

  I must take my herb tea which is free from tannin.

  MR OGMORE

  And have a charcoal biscuit which is good for me.

  MR PRITCHARD

  I may smoke one pipe of asthma mixture.

  MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

  in the woodshed, if you please.

  MR PRITCHARD

  And dust the parlour and spray the canary.

  MR OGMORE

  I must put on rubber gloves and search the peke for fleas.

  MR PRITCHARD

  I must dust the blinds and then I must raise them.

  MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

  And before you let the sun in, mind it wipes its shoes.

  In Butcher Beynon’s, Gossamer Beynon, daughter, schoolteacher, dreaming deep, daintily ferrets under a fluttering hummock of chicken’s feathers in a slaughterhouse that has chintz curtains and a three-pieced suite, and finds, with no surprise, a small rough ready man with a bushy tail winking in a paper carrier.

  ORGAN MORGAN

  Help,

  cries Organ Morgan, the organist, in his dream,

  there is perturbation and music in Coronation Street! All the spouses are honking like geese and the babies singing opera. P.C. Atilla Rees has got his truncheon out and is playing cadenzas by the pump, the cows from Sunday Meadow ring like reindeer, and on the roof of Handel Villa see the Women's Welfare hoofing, bloomered, in the moon.

  GOSSAMER BEYNON

  At last, my love,

  sighs Gossamer Beynon. And the bushy tail wags rude and ginger.

  At the sea-end of town, Mr and Mrs Floyd, the cocklers, are sleeping as quiet as death, side by wrinkled side, toothless, salt and brown, like two old kippers in a box.

  And high above, in Salt Lake Farm, Mr Utah Watkins counts, all night, the wife-faced sheep as they leap the fences on the hill, smiling and knitting and bleating just like Mrs Utah Watkins.

  UTAH WATKINS [Yawning]

  Thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, forty-eight, eighty-nine…

  MRS UTAH WATKINS

  Knit one slip one

  Knit two together

  Pass the slipstitch over…

  [Mrs Utah Watkins bleats]

  Ocky Milkman, drowned asleep in Cockle Street, is emptying his churns into the Dewi River,

  OCKY MILKMAN [Whispering]

  regardless of expense,

  and weeping like a funeral.

  Cherry Owen, next door, lifts a tankard to his lips but nothing flows out of it. He shakes the tankard. It turns into a fish. He drinks the fish.

  P.C. Attila Rees

  ATILLA REES

  lumps out of bed, dead to the dark and still foghorning, and drags out his helmet from under the bed; but deep in the backyard lock-up of his sleep a mean voice murmurs

  A VOICE [Murmuring]

  You’ll be sorry for this in the morning,

  ATILLA REES

  and he heave-ho’s back to bed.

  His helmet swashes in the dark.

  Willy Nilly, postman, asleep up street, walks fourteen miles to deliver the post as he does every day of the night, and rat-a-tats hard and sharp on Mrs Willy Nilly.

  MRS WILLY NILLY

  Don’t spank me, please, teacher,

  whimpers his wife at his side, but every night of her married life she has been late for school.

  Sinbad Sailors, over the taproom of the Sailors Arms, hugs his damp pillow whose secret name is Gossamer Beynon.

  A mogul catches Lily Smalls in the wash-house.

  LILY SMALLS

  Ooh, you old mogul!

  Mrs Rose Cottage’s eldest, Mae, peals off her pink-and-white skin in a furnace in a tower in a cave in a waterfall in a wood and waits there raw as an onion for Mister Right to leap up the burning tall hollow splashes of leaves like a brilliantined trout.

  MAE ROSE COTTAGE

  [Very close and softly, drawing out the words]

  Call me Dolores

  Like they do in the stories.

  Alone until she dies, Bessie Bighead, hired help, born in the workhouse, smelling of the cowshed, snores bass and gruff on a couch of straw in a loft in Salt Lake Farm and picks a posy of daisies in Sunday Meadow to put on the grave of Gomer Owen who kissed her once by the pig-sty when she wasn’t looking and never kissed her again although she was looking all the time.

  And the Inspectors of Cruelty fly down into Mrs Butcher Beynon’s dream to persecute Mr Beynon for selling

  BUTCHER BEYNON

  owl meat, dogs’ eyes, manchop.

  Mr Beynon, in butcher’s bloodied apron, spring-heels down Coronation Street, a finger, not his own, in his mouth. Straightfaced in his cunning sleep he pulls the legs of his dreams and

  BUTCHER BEYNON

  hunting on pigback shoots down the wild giblets.

  ORGAN MORGAN [High and softly]

  Help!

  GOSSAMER BEYNON [Softly]

  my foxy darling.

  Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks and sprats and shells and fishbones, whalejuice and moonshine and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea.

  The owls are hunting. Look, over Bethesda gravestones one hoots and swoops and catches a mouse by Hannah Rees, Beloved Wife. And in Coronation Street, which you alone can see it is so dark under the chapel in the skies, the Reverend Eli Jenkins, poet, preacher, turns in his deep towards-dawn sleep and dreams of

  REV. ELI JENKINS

  Eisteddfodau.

  He intricately rhymes, to the music of crwth and pibgorn, all night long in his druid’s seedy nightie in a beer-tent black with parchs.

  Mr Pugh, schoolmaster, fathoms asleep, pretends to be sleeping, spies foxy round the droop of his nightcap and

  MR PUGH

  Pssst!

  whistles up

  MR PUGH

  Murder.

  Mrs Organ Morgan, groceress, coiled grey like a dormouse, her paws to her ears, conjures

  MRS ORGAN MORGAN

  Silence.

  She sleeps very dulcet in a cove of wool, and trumpeting Organ Morgan at her side snores no louder than a spider.

  Mary Ann Sailors dreams of

  MARY ANN SAILORS

  the Garden of Eden.

  She comes in her smock-frock and clogs

  MARY ANN SAILORS

  away from the cool scrubbed cobbled kitchen with the Sunday-school pictures on the whitewashed wall and the farmers’ almanac hung above the settle and the sides of bacon on the ceiling hooks, and goes down the cockleshelled paths of that applepie kitchen garden, ducking under the gippo’s clothespegs, catching her apron on the blackcurrant bushes, past bean-rows and onion-bed and tomatoes ripening on the wall towards the old man playing the harmonium in the orchard, and sits down on the grass at his side and shells the green peas that grow up through the lap of her frock that brushes the dew.

  In Donkey Street, so furred with sleep, Dai Bread, Polly Garter, Nogood Boyo, and Lord Cut-Glass sigh before the dawn that is about to be and dream of

  DAI BREAD

  Turkish girls. Horizontal.

  POLLY GARTER

  Babies.

  NOGOOD BOYO

  Nothing.

  LORD CUT-GLASS

  Tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock.

  Time passes. Listen. Time passes.

  An owl flies home past Bethesda, to a chapel in an oak.

  And the dawn inches up.

  [One distant bell-note, faintly reverberating]

  Stand on this hill. This is Llareggub Hill, old as the hills, high, cool, and green, and from this small circle of stones, made not by druids but by Mrs Beynon’s Billy, you can see all the town below you sleeping in the first of the dawn.

  You can hear the love-sick woodpigeons mooning in bed. A dog barks in
his sleep, farmyards away. The town ripples like a lake in the waking haze.

  VOICE OF A GUIDE-BOOK

  Less than five hundred souls inhabit the three quaint streets and the few narrow by-lanes and scattered farmsteads that constitute this small, decaying watering-place which may, indeed, be called a ‘back water of life’ without disrespect to its natives who possess, to this day, a salty individuality of their own. The main street, Coronation Street, consists, for the most part, of humble, two-storied houses many of which attempt to achieve some measure of gaiety by prinking themselves out in crude colours and by the liberal use of pinkwash, though there are remaining a few eighteenth-century houses of more pretension, if, on the whole, in a sad state of disrepair. Though there is little to attract the hillclimber, the healthseeker, the sportsman, or the weekending motorist, the contemplative may, if sufficiently attracted to spare it some leisurely hours, find, in its cobbled streets and its little fishing harbour, in its several curious customs, and in the conversation of its local ‘characters,’ some of that picturesque sense of the past so frequently lacking in towns and villages which have kept more abreast of the times. The River Dewi is said to abound in trout, but is much poached. The one place of worship, with its neglected graveyard, is of no architectural interest.

  [A cock crows]

  The principality of the sky lightens now, over our green hill, into spring morning larked and crowed and belling.

  [Slow bell notes]

  Who pulls the townhall bellrope but blind Captain Cat? One by one, the sleepers are rung out of sleep this one morning as every morning. And soon you shall see the chimneys’ slow upflying snow as Captain Cat, in sailor’s cap and seaboots, announces to-day with his loud get-out-of-bed bell.

  The Reverend Eli Jenkins, in Bethesda House, gropes out of bed into his preacher’s black, combs back his bard’s white hair, forgets to wash, pads barefoot downstairs, opens the front door, stands in the doorway and, looking out at the day and up at the eternal hill, and hearing the sea break and the gab of birds, remembers his own verses and tells them softly to empty Coronation Street that is rising and raising its blinds.

  REV. ELI JENKINS

  Dear Gwalia! I know there are

  Towns lovelier than ours,

  And fairer hills and loftier far,

  And groves more full of flowers,

  And boskier woods more blithe with spring

  And bright with birds’ adorning,

  And sweeter bards than I to sing

  Their praise this beauteous morning.

  By Cader Idris, tempest-torn,

  Or Moel yr Wyddfa’s glory,

  Carnedd Llewelyn beauty born,

  Plinlimmon old in story,

  By mountains where King Arthur dreams,

  By Penmaenmawr defiant,

  Llareggub Hill a molehill seems,

  A pygmy to a giant.

  By Sawddwy, Senny, Dovey, Dee,

  Edw, Eden, Aled, all,

  Taff and Towy broad and free,

  Llyfnant with its waterfall,

  Claerwen, Cleddau, Dulais, Daw,

  Ely, Gwili, Ogwr, Nedd,

  Small is our River Dewi, Lord,

  A baby on a rushy bed.

  By Carreg Cennen, King of time,

  Our Heron Head is only

  A bit of stone with seaweed spread

  Where gulls come to be lonely.

  A tiny dingle is Milk Wood

  By Golden Grove ‘neath Grongar,

  But let me choose and oh! I should

  Love all my life and longer

  To stroll among our trees and stray

  In Goosegog Lane, on Donkey Down,

  And hear the Dewi sing all day,

  And never, never leave the town.

  The Reverend Jenkins closes the front door. His morning service is over.

  [Slow bell notes]

  Now, woken at last by the out-of-bed-sleepy-head-Polly-put-the-kettle-on townhall bell, Lily Smalls, Mrs Beynon’s treasure, comes downstairs from a dream of royalty who all night long went larking with her full of sauce in the Milk Wood dark, and puts the kettle on the primus ring in Mrs Beynon’s kitchen, and looks at herself in Mr Beynon’s shaving-glass over the sink, and sees:

  LILY SMALLS

  Oh there’s a face!

  Where you get that hair from?

  Got it from a old torn cat.

  Give it back then, love.

  Oh, there’s a perm!

  Where you get that nose from, Lily?

  Got it from my father, silly.

  You’ve got it on upside down!

  Oh, there’s a conk!

  Look at your complexion!

  Oh, no, you look.

  Needs a bit of make-up.

  Needs a veil.

  Oh, there’s glamour!

  Where you get that smile, Lil?

  Never you mind, girl.

  Nobody loves you.

  That’s what you think.

  Who is it loves you?

  Shan’t tell.

  Come on, Lily.

  Cross your heart, then?

  Cross my heart.

  And very softly, her lips almost touching her reflection, she breathes the name and clouds the shaving-glass.

  MRS BEYNON [Loudly, from above]

  Lily!

  LILY SMALLS [Loudly]

  Yes, mum…

  MRS BEYNON

  ‘Where’s my tea, girl?

  LILY SMALLS

  [Softly] Where d’you think? In the cat-box?

  [Loudly] Coming up, mum…

  Mr Pugh, in the School House opposite, takes up the morning tea to Mrs Pugh, and whispers on the stairs

  MR PUGH

  Here’s your arsenic, dear.

  And your weedkiller biscuit.

  I’ve throttled your parakeet.

  I’ve spat in the vases.

  I’ve put cheese in the mouseholes.

  Here’s your…

  [Door creaks open]

  …nice tea, dear.

  MRS PUGH

  Too much sugar.

  MR PUGH

  You haven’t tasted it yet, dear.

  MRS PUGH

  Too much milk, then. Has Mr Jenkins said his poetry?

  MR PUGH

  Yes, dear.

  MRS PUGH

  Then it’s time to get up. Give me my glasses. No, not my reading glasses, I want to look out. I want to see

  Lily Smalls the treasure down on her red knees washing the front step.

  She’s tucked her dress in her bloomers—oh, the baggage!

  P.C. Attila Rees, ox-broad, barge-booted, stamping out of Handcuff House in a heavy beef-red huff, black-browed under his damp helmet…

  He’s going to arrest Polly Garter, mark my words.

  MR PUGH

  What for, dear?

  MRS PUGH

  For having babies.

  SECOND VOICE

  … and lumbering down towards the strand to see that the sea is still there.

  Mary Ann Sailors, opening her bedroom window above the taproom and calling out to the heavens

  MARY ANN SAILORS

  I’m eighty-five years three months and a day!

  MRS PUGH

  I will say this for her, she never makes a mistake.

  Organ Morgan at his bedroom window playing chords on the sill to the morning fishwife gulls who, heckling over Donkey Street, observe

  DAI BREAD

  Me, Dai Bread, hurrying to the bakery, pushing in my shirt-tails, buttoning my waistcoat, ping goes a button, why can’t they sew them, no time for breakfast, nothing for breakfast, there’s wives for you.

  MRS DAI BREAD ONE

  Me, Mrs Dai Bread One, capped and shawled and no old corset, nice to be comfy, nice to be nice, clogging on the cobbles to stir up a neighbour. Oh, Mrs Sarah, can you spare a loaf, love? Dai Bread forgot the bread. There’s a lovely morning! How’s your boils this morning? Isn’t that good news now, it’s a change to sit down. Ta
, Mrs Sarah.

  MRS DAI BREAD TWO

  Me, Mrs Dai Bread Two, gypsied to kill in a silky scarlet petticoat above my knees, dirty pretty knees, see my body through my petticoat brown as a berry, high-heel shoes with one heel missing, tortoiseshell comb in my bright black slinky hair, nothing else at all but a dab of scent, lolling gaudy at the doorway, tell your fortune in the tea-leaves, scowling at the sunshine, lighting up my pipe.

  LORD CUT-GLASS

  Me, Lord Cut-Glass, in an old frock-coat belonged to Eli Jenkins and a pair of postman’s trousers from Bethesda Jumble, running out of doors to empty slops—mind there, Rover!—and then running in again, tick tock.